


nothing but time and a face that you lose

by notbang



Category: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Fusion, F/M, Nonlinear Progression of Time, ie crude in the way rebecca bunch would be if standards and practices wasn't an issue, kind of like if you replaced 4x11-12 with an acid trip, rating is just to be safe but not so much smut as an irreverence for sexual acts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-26
Updated: 2019-03-26
Packaged: 2019-12-18 07:53:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18245588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbang/pseuds/notbang
Summary: He’s not sure he really even believes in it, all this new age memory alteration nonsense. But the procedure is expensive and drastic in a dramatic way that he won’t admit out loud kind of appeals to him, and he looks at the photo he keeps of himself on his wall and thinks about how the person in that photo would have cut his heart out if it afforded him a better sense of control.That—he wants to go back to that.Nathaniel Plimpton III (Esq.) has erased Rebecca Bunch from his memory. Please refrain from mentioning their relationship to him again.





	nothing but time and a face that you lose

**Author's Note:**

> An _Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind_ AU, but no prior knowledge of the film should be required to understand it. Title is from the lovely _[Your Ex Lover Is Dead](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5Or6-HOveg)_ by Stars.

Nathaniel can hear music.

He can hear music but he can’t quite make out the song over the hustle and bustle from the nearby sidewalk, and it’s quiet enough that he can’t identify individual words and loud enough that his ears won’t stop straining to listen, and the end result leaves him restless, raring to be on his way.

“Collarderal Damage to go.”

He’s still looking at his watch and only half paying attention when he reaches for his order, jerking his hand back in surprise like he’s been zapped when it collides with someone else’s.

“Um. Excuse me,” the girl says, shooting him a funny look as she snatches up the plastic up.

The girl, Nathaniel comes to realise, is the source of the distractingly muted music—the earphone jack on her phone has pulled partway lose, hanging in that weird space where the output splits itself into two streams to half-blast out the speaker, leaving her none the wiser. She’s wearing a studded leather jacket over a floral yellow dress and the bottom two thirds of her hair are a bright, deep blue—a mass of ocean waves that bounce when she moves. 

It’s as if somebody’s turned up the saturation on her, and Nathaniel can’t make himself look away. 

“By all means. Go ahead,” he tells her, tone only a tiny bit mocking. “It’s not like there’s an ordered system, or anything.”

He’s fairly certain the drink is his—he’d remember, seeing that hair in front of him in the line—but whatever. He can be a gentleman.

“Sorry, what?” She yanks the earbuds out of her ears one at a time and seems to realise her audio malfunction, scrambling to silence her phone altogether. She still has the gall to shoot an irritated glare in his direction before turning to the cashier.

As much as he’d like to focus his attention elsewhere, he can’t help the pinprick of interest that draws his gaze back to her, schooling his features into an image of impatience as she grows increasingly flustered, patting at the pockets of her jacket with chagrin.

An impulse without an origin terminates on the tip of his tongue. _We’re nice now._

He grits his teeth and brings up the token on his smart watch.

 

|◀◀

When Heather swings open the door to see him, the groan is so long and unimpressed he takes a half-step back from the force of it.

“Babe, can you call WhiJo?” she calls over her shoulder, dragging the words out in a whine, her arms pointedly barricading off the doorframe. “Because Collateral Damage the Third just showed up, and I really think it’s someone else’s turn to tap in.”

WhiJo doesn’t answer, but he does text Nathaniel in lieu of taking Hector’s call.

_I'm warning you, dude. You don’t want to do this. Just let her go and walk away._

“You should probably sit down,” Hector advises, and then tries to give him tea.

“Tea? I don’t want tea,” Nathaniel says irritably, pushing the mug away. “I just want to know where Rebecca is. Her pretzel shop has been shut for two weeks, she’s not answering my texts or calls, and every time I try to ask Paula about her she freezes over with the force of an arctic blast and gusts out of the room. Is Rebecca okay? Did… did something happen again?”

“ _Ohhh_ ,” Heather says, widening her eyes. “No, she’s fine. I kind of want to strangle her with my bare hands, though, for leaving me to clean up her mess.” 

“Babe, you should just tell him. Rip off the bandaid,” Hector says. He keeps the tea for himself and joins them on the couch. “Rebecca’s not here, man. She went back to New York, and she didn’t tell you, because she doesn’t know who you are.”

He’s holding three printed notecards, and he hands one of them to Nathaniel.

_Rebecca Bunch has erased Nathaniel Plimpton from her memory. Please refrain from mentioning their relationship to her again._

“Is this some kind of joke?” he asks.

“She wanted to erase her dropkick of a dad,” Heather explains, “but they don’t let you do parents, because it messes too much with the internal structure of your psyche. But erasing three dudes you’ve all but oriented the last three years of your life around— _that’s_ okay, apparently.”

“No, this doesn’t make sense,” Nathaniel insists, pushing to his feet and gesticulating at the card. “Rebecca wouldn’t do this. She has her therapy, and her friends are here, and—how could any of you let her do this?”

For the first time since he showed up, Heather looks at him with some degree of pity. “You and I both know there’s no stopping Rebecca when she sets her mind to something. And it’s like, the more misguided she’s being, the more stubborn she gets. I asked her what Dr Shin had to say about it, because it just kind of seems like messing with your already somewhat fragile mental state probably isn’t, you know, the best thing for somebody with a personality disorder,” she continues, “but she just lied to my face and insisted he said it was fine. Thought it was a great way to start over and refocus, even. And here we are.”

“I’m sorry, dude,” Hector adds, apologetic as he sips his secondhand tea. “This blows.”

Nathaniel takes the notecard with him when he leaves.

 

►►|

“You come here often?” the girl jokes, falling into step beside him. She says it like she’s aware of just how hackneyed she’s being, like it’s something she can harness to make herself more charming.

“Not anymore.” He realises as soon as the words come out of his mouth that they sound like an insult, but he doesn’t bother explaining himself. 

The girl isn’t visibly deterred in the slightest.

“I just wanted something green and healthy looking, that didn’t have an off-putting name like _Anustart_ or _S’not Gross_ , because even though I love puns my appetite is very easily influenced by wordplay. Like, logically I know that the better it is for me the more disgusting it’s probably going to taste, but I’d like to delay the inevitability of that realisation for my tastebuds until the last possible second, you know?”

He regards her with an expression he hopes conveys his bemusement at her unnecessary prolonging of their interaction.

“I’m walking the same way,” she dismisses with an airy wave of her hand. “Plus, I’m now indebted to you, so. Think carefully about what you’re going to do with this newfound power.”

Nathaniel resists the urge to roll his eyes. “Look, we don’t have to do this. I did my good deed for the day, but there’s no need to make it into something it’s not.”

“Something like what, exactly?” the girl asks, raising her eyebrows.

“I get it,” he says, indicating his face. “This jawline, coupled with my astounding act of chivalry? The compulsion to throw yourself at me must be strong. And I’m flattered, really—you’re just not my type.”

“Throw myself at you?” she echoes in an incredulous scoff of laughter. “Oh my god, are you listening to yourself?”

Nathaniel tugs on his tie, unruffled. “I have somewhere important I need to be,” he says, seriously.

“And I believe you,” she retorts, the twitch of her eyebrows belying her words. “So what do you do, besides apparently drink these for a living?”

He doesn’t miss the way her eyes slide over the slope of his shoulders. The prickle of heat along the back of his neck is distracting enough that he forgets to formulate a response.

“I’m more of a pretzel and donut girl, myself,” she continues, unperturbed, and he has to bite back the way the word _evidently_ forms on the tip of his tongue. “But I’ve been feeling sorta lost, lately, and admittedly my baseline for normal is a lot different to most people’s, but I just really felt like I needed a complete do-over, you know?” She flashes her takeaway cup at him, indicating the logo— _New Leaf Organic. “_ I’m kind of trying to get healthy in my life, and I guess this is like a liquid—”

“—restart button,” he finishes for her, then pauses to give her a strange look. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

“Do you believe in deja vu?” she asks, ignoring him. He definitely doesn’t, but she doesn’t seem to be interested in his answer, either. “I think I read somewhere once that it’s the universe telling you you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.”

“Hmm. Let me guess— _Cosmopolitan_ magazine?”

She pulls a childish face at him, then wraps her perfect pink lips around the straw in an obnoxious slurp. “Oh, _god._ Gross. You actually think this tastes good?” She makes an exaggerated gagging noise. “Wow. Congratulations. You are officially the worst person I’ve ever met.”

Nathaniel sighs. “And yet… here you still are.”

 

**|◀◀**

Nathaniel’s in an office, and he can hear himself talking. 

“She’s not even my type,” he is saying, and he is also listening to himself, observing himself speak. “She’s loud, and obnoxious, and she eats way too many carbs. And she’s right—all we do when we’re together is cheat, and lie, and make each other worse.” 

It feels even more like perjury the second time around. 

“And she broke up with me, multiple times, but I still can’t stop thinking about her, and I just want all that to go away. I want to be able to look at her and not feel… anything. I want to move on with my life.”

He’s not sure he really even believes in it, all this new age memory alteration nonsense. But the procedure is expensive and drastic in a dramatic way that he won’t admit out loud kind of appeals to him, and he looks at the photo he keeps of himself on his wall and thinks about how the person in that photo would have cut his heart out if it afforded him a better sense of control. 

That—he wants to go back to that.

The lab tech rifles through the box of belongings he brought with him. It isn’t much—a couple of his shirts, seven paperback books he’d had to dig out from beneath his bed, and a pen—and she looks at him questioningly.

“I’m not—I’m not a sentimental person,” he explains. “I don’t really keep photos, or trinkets, or mementos. But Rebecca, she’s… everywhere.” He shrugs helplessly. “She’s on everything.”

_Empty your home. Empty your life. Everything that reminds you of her will be gone._

The doctor hands him the pen. “Mr Plimpton, I want you to think very carefully of when you first met Rebecca Bunch.”

 

►►|

“Ah,” Nathaniel says, eyeing the wrinkled yellow envelope that was apparently more important to her than her purse. “You’re one of those.”

Her affronted expression is almost comical. “Excuse me? One of ‘those’? One of what, exactly?”

He gestures vaguely in her direction. “You’re an actress, right? Or at least a waitress that thinks she is one. Seen _La La Land_ one too many times and thinks that’s an accurate depiction of life.”

She raises her eyebrows at him, but something in her expression is oddly chuffed. “And how many times have you seen _La La Land,_ Mr My Daddy’s Going to Sue Your Daddy for Talking Smack About My Smoothie Stand?”

“Just the right amount—zero,” he says, as if it’s the only appropriate answer. 

“Figures. And for the record, you are so far off the mark it isn’t funny.”

“I’m sorry, did you _not_ just come from an audition?”

He’s blatant as he rakes his gaze over her the way she did earlier, only swallowing a little when it lingers in the lengthy line of cleavage distractingly framed by the yellow neckline and the contrasting lapels of her jacket. He lived in LA long enough to know the type—always a stack of audition sides well-worn from study clutched in one hand, a hastily discarded apron scrunched in the other.

He imagines she smells like coffee grounds, and has to resist the absurd compulsion to sniff her to find out.

She hugs the envelope a little tighter to her ample chest, defensive. “Well, yeah. But not for like, a movie or a hair commercial or anything. It was just some community musical theatre. An amateur production of _Wicked,_ to be specific.”

Smiling like she’s just confirmed some long-held suspicion, he tilts his chin up, towards the sun. “Mm, because Broadway aspirations are _so_ much more realistic.”

She has to adopt an awkward sort of jog to keep up with him, unable to properly match her short strides to his longer ones, and he hates that he finds her cross flurry of irritation on some level oddly endearing. 

He purses his lips, and definitely doesn’t slow his pace down in response.

 

**|◀◀**

She’s wearing a purple-pink monstrosity of a bathing suit—a rhapsody in an offensive shade of fuchsia—and it’s as if somebody’s turned up the saturation on her, and Nathaniel can’t make himself look away.

“Is this her? This who we’ve been waiting for? This is Rebecca Bunch, your star attorney?”

He doesn’t realise just how far he’s unravelled until he finds himself suddenly back at the start; back where he’s still cool and precise and collected, with some semblance of control.

This technically wasn’t the first time he’d laid eyes on her—he’d seen her photo in the paper, when one of her cases had gained a big enough following to make it to page three—but there had been such a disarming difference between a year-old headshot from her New York firm in two dimensions and black and white to having her in front of him in the flesh, so animated and unexpectedly _colourful._

Rebecca pauses with her hand on the door and looks back to make sure he’s heard her, to make sure he realises what he’s losing; she’ll never give him that chance again.

“Great, you’re leaving,” he hears himself say, and has to fight not to scrunch up his face at the sour taste of it.

He doesn’t try to stop her, and then she’s gone.

 

►►|

“Wonderful. You’re still here,” he says with as much disinterest as he can muster.

They’re paused at a crosswalk, waiting for a green. Nathaniel had been ready to dart across regardless but at the last moment he’d noticed the blonde little boy, hand strained upwards to clutch at his mother’s and eyes dutifully glued to the lights, and his legs had refused to cooperate. 

The hesitation had been all the handicap she’d needed to catch him up.

“You know, I’m not… I’m not the kind of person you’re imagining,” she says, and he gazes down the pathway behind her to wonder at which point exactly along it she managed to lose her breath. “With the hair and the jacket. It’s not really me, is what I’m saying.”

Against his better judgment he says, “Okay. I’ll bite. What’s the real you, then, hmm? In all her bald, bare-armed glory.”

She shrugs. “She’s a work in progress.”

“Right,” he says, remembering the beverage in his hand and taking a tentative sip. “Thus the drink.”

“I have this habit of changing myself to fit the idea of who I think people want me to be,” she says. “To what will get people to like me. But I’m trying to be more than that, you know?”

“I think it’s working,” he quips, flashing a sardonic smile. “I barely like you at all.”

“Do you ever get this nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right with your life, but you can’t put your finger on it, or you don’t really want to, so you do something else, like get a tattoo or pierce your ears?”

He arches an eyebrow at her. “Can’t say I can relate.”

The crosswalk finally flashes its encouragement, and despite her intentions to follow having been made more than clear, he rolls his eyes as she crosses it alongside him.

“My old housemate, she used to have these bright coloured streaks in her hair, and I always kind of thought she was the coolest person I’d ever met. So I decided to take a page out of her book. And here we are.”

“How very whimsical of you.”

“I’ve always been a fan of matching my nail polish to my mood, this time I levelled up and channelled the impulse elsewhere. Now I kind of feel like Tonks, or something.”

He looks at her blankly.

“Nymphadora Tonks?” she elaborates. “From Harry Potter? Her hair magically changes colours.”

“Do I look like someone that’s read a child’s wizard book, to you?”

She clucks at him, clutching a mocking hand to her chest. “ _God,_ your life must be so miserable and depressing.”

“Apparently so is yours, if matching your hair to your mood turned up blue,” he shoots back, a lot more haughtily than intended.

Two lilac-tipped pointer fingers jab accusingly towards his face so unexpectedly that he has to jerk away. “Ha, wrong,” she counters smugly. “The colour blue represents stability, which is this brand new thing I’m trying.”

He hums, tilting his head, unconvinced. “I’m not sure how to tell you that dyeing your hair a primary colour probably isn’t the best way to telegraph stability.”

 

**|◀◀**

“Well, Whatshisname out there—he’s definitely a Hufflepuff.”

Rebecca laughs, the sound of it billowing out, filling up the entire space. “Admit it. You’re just assigning him what you perceive to be the most boring house because you think he’s boring and ineffectual. Hufflepuffs like to help people—and look where he left us! Maybe he’s a little bit Gryffindor.”

“Like you, you mean?”

“Okay. Okay, fine. Maybe I’m a little bit Gryffindor.”

She’s curled invitingly towards him, her shoes off and to the side. He can still recall the smell of her perfume, or perhaps shampoo—something floral and feminine and inevitably diluted by the day but amplified here in his memories until the elevator is entirely heady with it.

She hasn’t even kissed him yet, and Nathaniel feels strangely warm all over.

This is where it really started, he thinks, if he’s honest with himself, taking in the sight of her in the orange of the elevator mood lighting, skin golden, her hair a compacted mass of honey brown curls that make it feel like a lifetime ago. Not when she kissed him but the way she listened to him and didn’t laugh; the way she talked to him like he was a person, somebody worthy of her time. He drinks it in until he’s drunk and dizzy off of it, the confusing transition from sexual tension to an entirely different kind of intrigue.

Four inconsequential facts, only three of them new information, and without being able to explain why, he’d found himself wanting to know everything about her.

He shifts closer to her, and the emergency lights dip and flicker. His satchel winks out of existence beside him. Rebecca’s bag. Rebecca’s shoes. Rebecca’s phone.

Rebecca.

“No,” he says sharply as the edges of the elevator begin to burn, to singe and sear away. “I changed my mind about this one. I want—I want to keep it.”

The walls feel like they’re getting closer, creeping inwards; like he’s running out of air. His fight or flight response surges, summons up that last second struggle that kicks in before suffocating—survival instincts, telling your body how much you shouldn’t want to let go.

His fists pound on the metal doors. “Can’t you hear me, George? I’ve changed my mind! I don’t want this. I don’t want you to take her anymore, okay? Undo it—I need you to undo it!”

 _You’re fired_ , he thinks furiously, struggling to stay conscious through the lack of oxygen getting to his brain. _When I get out of here you’re so seriously fired this time._

The lights come back on, then go out completely, and the elevator groans as the cable snaps and everything starts rushing horribly downwards.

 

►►|

“You don’t know me,” she says. “You don’t know anything about me. You don’t have me pegged.”

She tosses her dipped-in-ink hair over her shoulder before recapturing a strand to twist around her pointer finger, and Nathaniel watches the way it spirals around and around, oddly hypnotic.

“Besides all the weirdly personal details you just blurted out to a complete stranger on the street? Okay, Smurfette.” He mentally congratulates himself for that one, and lets himself preen for a second, wishing there had been someone else around to hear it. 

She pulls a face at him, unamused. “Really? That’s the best you could come up with? She doesn’t even have blue hair.”

He frowns.

“Don’t you ever think about first impressions, and how nobody ever really knows anybody, because we all just lack the context to get the bigger picture?”

“Not really. Do you always talk this much?”

“Are you always such a grouch?” she counters.

He says nothing, and when they pass a vending machine she smacks him abruptly on the chest and he grunts out his surprise.

“Hey, can you spot me a fiver?” she asks, pouting in a way he thinks is supposed to be enticing, her eyes so wide he feels like if he pitched forward far enough he’d fall right into them. The appeal is shattered by the nasally whine she adopts when she elaborates, “I’m _so_ thirsty.”

He frowns harder. “What happened to the drink I bought you?”

Her gaze shifts apologetically to the nearest trashcan.

 

**|◀◀**

Rebecca is walking towards him in a red dress, and she looks beautiful, and it’s as if somebody’s turned up the saturation on her and Nathaniel can’t make himself look away. 

She asks him what he wants and he hates how heartfelt it comes out when he tells her, “You.”

_I want you. I’ve always wanted you._

Sex with Rebecca is a lot like what he imagined—she’s enthusiastic, playful, and she knows what she wants but ultimately talks too much to maintain her seductive facade. She’s always been a little silly, and it’s always made him kind of silly, too.

When she comes back from the bathroom she’s wearing his white dress shirt, and it’s a hundred times better than any expensive lingerie he could have chosen.

“Wow,” he says, mouth suddenly dry.

He kisses and nips his way down the column of her throat, finds the swell of her breast and sucks through the fabric until her laughter turns to steady gasping, until she’s writhing above him in his lap. It’s even better than he remembers—this second pass at their second time—and every remaining detail sharpens momentarily to the visceral. The shiny, sweaty smudges of her eye makeup; the half-coifed tangle of her hair. His too-big sleeves trailing down around her fingertips as she braces herself on his shoulders and the brush of the shirttails dipping behind her where her warm legs bracket his thighs.

“I want to see you,” he says thickly, pleading, hands grasping anywhere he can get at her. “Please. Let me see you.”

She takes off her mask, and there’s nothing there but a blur.

He screws his eyes shut so he doesn’t have to look at the horrifying space where her face used to be, and when he comes his fingers dig into her hips like they could sink right through them, like there’s nothing left to hold on to. 

“I don’t—I don’t think I want you to go,” he pants against the fading mirage of her collarbone, tasting the salty tang of her illusory sweat.

Rebecca dismounts and flops over in the bed like he hasn’t spoken, and the patch of her chest that’s still visible above the collar of his shirt is flushed an enticing shade of pink. 

He knows what happens next—when they stir together, and she speaks—so he does his best to fight it, keep his breathing slow and even so she’ll stay sleeping, silently curled into his side. But when he doesn’t open his eyes to look at her she slips from the bed and pads back to the bathroom, and every second he can hear the shower running is another second he spends forgetting her face.

She writes _why couldn't you understand what I really want_ across his mirror with half-formed fingers, and later—after the door slams, when the steam comes to fog up every last corner this memory occupies in his mind—he breathes her name against the glass and for a final, fleeting moment, he remembers.

 

►►|

“What happened to getting healthy, hmm?”

“Uh, that’s why I chose the diet soda. Yeah. Obviously. Come on, Sequoia,” she says as she’s jamming the last of his loose change into the machine and thumping it for good measure. “Don’t be such a stick in the mud.”

He freezes at that. “What did you just call me?”

He can’t explain it, the strange flash that goes off inside of him like a hand grenade, any more than he can explain why he’s stayed beside her when he could have, should have tossed the money at her and run.

“Sequoia,” she repeats, then pauses at the way he’s still staring at her. “Oh, what—arboreal references aren’t your thing?”

“I’m not sure they’re anyone’s thing,” he tells her, “but do you care to elaborate on that?”

She visibly bristles, and he thinks it might be her version of embarrassment. “You know. Because you’re tall and wooden and—presumably—native to California.”

As if unable to keep herself from confirming some secret suspicion, she extends a splayed hand and stops just short of pressing it to his chest, startled by the metallic clunk of her soda can dropping into the bottom of the dispenser.

He clears his throat, she shakes herself, and the hand falls away.

 

**|◀◀**

He didn’t come here for this, he remembers. He didn’t plan to come at all.

One minute he’d been driving towards the office, the case notes stacked high in the passenger seat behind him. There’d been a pile-up on South Cameron, so he’d taken a detour, and—well. A detour had turned into a drive-by, just to catch a glimpse of her car in the driveway, and somewhere in all of that, he’d found himself knocking on her door.

“Can I ask you something?” he asks, nose still pressed against her neck, breathing her in. “It’s just—Josh, I understand. The wedding, you running off to New York… the plane. That all makes sense. But why me?” He swallows. “Was it really that unbearable to you, the memory of of us?”

“Come on, dude. I can’t tell you that.”

He lets his hand slip down to where her sweater’s ridden up over her lower back and rubs his thumb absently across the exposed skin. “Why not?”

“Because I’m a figment of your imagination,” she says gently, apologetic as she continues to sweep broad circles across his shoulders. “I can’t tell you something you don’t already know.”

They stand there for so long that they start swaying on the spot, moving to an instrumental only the two of them can hear. It takes him back to the masquerade, and dancing, and then a different kind of dancing, and _when I’m around you, I stop thinking about myself and I think about you._

He hasn’t been able to think about anything else since, and it’s a weakness he should grateful to be rid of.

“I don’t know if I can have sex,” she blurts out eventually, stepping back, and for a moment her sweater is more black than maroon, the sunny space around them comprised a little more from accusing shades of grey. “I don’t know if the books say that I can have sex yet. And I definitely am not ready for a relationship—not that that’s what you’re trying to do.”

He thinks about alternate Rebecca and Nathaniel in the parallel universe, that did any number of things differently. That maybe didn’t fuck the whole thing up.

“I wish we could just start over,” he murmurs. “I’d wait for you. I wish you just asked me to wait.”

He lets himself pretend he’d had the capacity to have listened.

The ocean on Rebecca’s wall rises up, overflowing, and when he opens his eyes she’s gone, her house is gone, and like everything else that was in it he lets himself drown and get washed away.

 

►►|

“Dude, wait up.”

“Why are you even still following me?” he asks her once she’s done downing her entire soda in practically one go, finishing off with a gentle, respectable burp that’s more of a hiccup, but sends him wincing regardless.

She shrugs. “I’ve got nowhere to be, and you seem like you’re headed somewhere important. I’m kind of growing on you, though, right?”

“Like slime on the bottom of a rock.”

 

|◀◀ 

Rebecca has a bruise high up on her left butt cheek the size of a golf ball, blue and purple blooming beneath the skin and mottling into yellow at the edges. She rubs it gingerly as she twists to inspect it in the mirror, letting out a surprised squeal when he drags her closer to him by the hips so he can press his lips to it, kiss it better.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, mouth tender against the watercolour texture of her skin. “I didn't mean to hurt you.”

She grins at him as she slips into her black sweater and slides back onto the bed beside him, pushes up on her knees to wrap around him from behind. “The imprint of your cold faucet handle on my ass is far from the worst injury I’ve managed to sustain from a sexual encounter, believe me.”

It’s past the time Nathaniel would normally leave for work. He’s going to be late, and he’s never late, has never _wanted_ to be late so much in his life.

“Hey. Maybe if you just… think really hard, and hold on really tight, they can’t take me.”

Her arms tighten around his waist in demonstration, the strands of her still-wet hair soaking into the collar of his shirt and her voice muffled where she buries herself in the crease of his neck. She’s warm and naked save for the soft knit of her sweater, and he wants to pin her to his bed and crawl back inside her and never let her leave.

He tries. 

But then he remembers her standing in his entranceway in her blue cardigan a few weeks from now, clutching her purse as she tells him they can’t be together. He remembers office supplies and highlighters, _are you home? alone?_ and standing, confused, in his mockingly empty hallway. He remembers eating and drinking in horrible, undisciplined excess before carving his manic path through the Californian wilderness with a machete, trying to feel anything other than and as strongly as _betrayal._ He remembers her porch, her brother, the resoluteness in her eyes and the crisp white card with both their names.

He remembers every empty space she ever left him with—

—and then, just as easily, he forgets.

 

►►|

When they reach the sign post at the end of the street, he stares at the landmark marker pointing off to the left and blinks, surveying his surroundings as if he can’t quite decipher how he got here. 

Following his line of sight, she narrows her eyes in suspicion, pointing. “Were you… were you walking to the zoo, this whole time?”

“What? No.”

She practically starts vibrating, her mouth going wide in an excited little ‘o’ as she jabs her pointer fingers in his direction. “Oh my god, you totally were. You were walking towards the zoo. I’m so glad I followed you just to get on your nerves. This is _so_ whimsical.”

His pulse starts to pound in his ears, and he feels dizzy.

“I’ve never done anything like this before,” he says before he can stop himself.

She raises her eyebrows. “Go to the zoo?”

“No, I… I should be driving back to the office, right now. I should be at work.” 

_Packing up my desk. Updating my resumé. Being proactive._

He runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t even know who I am, right now.”

“Well hey,” she says, holding up her hands. “You can’t pin this on me. My turn off was two and half blocks back—I’m the one following you. But for what it’s worth, I’m firmly in camp ‘well, we’re here now’.” She starts to walk backwards towards the ticket booth, turning to him with a sheepish grin. “And I forgot my purse, remember?” 

He sighs. “Has anyone ever told you you’re kind of an asshole?”

 

**|◀◀**

When he comes to, Rebecca is prying his cheeks apart and darting her tongue as far as it will fit inside him.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he breathes, and nearly smashes his nose on the headboard the way he surges forward from the sensation.

Rebecca lets out a surprised grunt and claws her way up his lower back to brace herself, the arm of the hand that was stroking his cock wrapping itself around his waist for balance. “Were the teeth too much? I was trying to be gentle.”

He slips out of her grip, twisting against the headboard to face her, and judging by the hesitant way she sits back on her heels and wipes the back of her hand across her mouth, it probably looks a lot like he’s doing his best to keep certain parts of his anatomy angled away from her.

“Did I hurt you?” she asks, eyebrows knotting their way up her forehead. Her hair is still wet from their shower. “Because I felt like it was less of a bite and more of a light graze, which _Cosmo_ seems to think is—”

“No. No, nothing like that. It was just… a lot. No one’s ever done that to me before.” He takes a deep, steadying breath and opens his arms to her. “Come here.”

She clambers forward eagerly, her smile so sweet in her relief that he leans in to kiss her until he thinks better of it, earning a husky laugh from Rebecca in response. Apparently no offence taken, she mouths at his pulse point instead, curling into his side, raking her nails down his abdomen and sliding her open palm over where he’s still hard and leaking against his stomach.

He thinks about how she makes him do things and feel things and want things he never has before—how she woke something up deep inside of him that can’t be put back to sleep.

“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says, embarrassingly earnestly, tucking her hair behind her ear. 

She bites her lip and giggles. Dips her thumb into the tip. “Wow. You eat a guy’s ass _one_ time…”

 

►►|

“So now that your secret is out about where you were going,” she says as they press through the turnstile, “where were you coming from? Shouldn’t you be back in some executive boardroom by now with eleven other over-privileged white men?”

Her teasing only makes him all the more reluctant to answer the question, but the truth slips out of his traitorous lips before he can fumble for a better misdirect. “I was over at the Wilson—”

“You play golf?” she interrupts. 

She doesn’t latch on to the cliche in the way he expects, her tone more conversational than mocking. Some of the pre-emptively defensive tension eases out of his shoulders, but not completely.

He sighs. “If you can call it that. My father does. It’s one of his favourite tactics, actually—disguising an unpleasant conversation with an overly civil round on the fairway.” 

“So what was it?”

“What was what?”

“The unpleasant conversation,” she says, rolling her eyes.

“None of your business,” he shoots back pointedly, accompanying it with a tight smile and an indignant flick of his wrist.

 

**|◀◀**

Rebecca runs away to New York again, and Nathaniel takes himself to the zoo.

Or— _no,_ that’s not quite right, he thinks, the scent of her pillows still heady in his mind. 

So Rebecca stood him up, or she dumped him, or rejected him, or never gave him an answer to something he’d told her in not so many words, and in his misery he just wants to lie in her bed and feel close to her, but instead he takes himself to the zoo.

He throws back spinach smoothies like they’re tequila shots, like he can juice cleanse the leftover parts of her out of his head, his heart, his life, and as he meanders between the exhibits his mood grows increasingly maudlin.

He’s not sure what kind of budget this particular zoo is operating on—somewhere shy of San Diego’s, that’s for sure—because the exhibits leave a lot to be desired, he thinks as he peers in at the furry giraffe with only a lamp and a television unit for an environment. The stuffed alligator fairs a little better, swimming in its sea of mandala sheeting, and if he squints hard enough through the awful purple lighting of the big cat enclosure he can just make out the half-masks of the tiger and the panther staring back at him through the bushes. 

The flying squirrel display is unnervingly empty.

“I don’t even know what you are,” he says, addressing the small, fluffy, green creature in the cage between the pale pink bunny-puppy and the hot pink porcupine-troll hybrids that he can only posit is itself partway between a dog and a pig.

 _Green Dog Pig,_ the exhibit placard informs him helpfully, and Nathaniel throws up his hands.

The aquarium’s not much better, he thinks, as he eyeballs the oversized silver wall hanging suspended in the tank for the short stretch of time before not-Susan throws him out. 

It doesn’t even sing.

►►|

“I hope you’re happy,” she hums quietly, not quite under her voice enough that he can’t hear her or miss the degree to which she is terribly off-key. “Now that you’re choosing this…”

He lets the sound of her trail off as she moves down the pathway away from him, watching from afar as she scrutinises each placard before studying the relevant animal in turn. It’s disorientingly endearing, the effusive, childlike enjoyment she exhibits, and Nathaniel is charmed entirely despite himself.

“My housemate used to have a starfish,” she calls out to him, pressed up against the glass so that when she pulls away she leaves a nose-shaped smudge mark in her wake. “You know. The one with the hair. Her name was Estrella—the starfish, not the housemate.” 

“Spanish word for star,” he says. “Cute.”

“You speak Spanish?”

He quirks an eyebrow at her, pleased to have somehow caught her by surprise.

“She’s mad at me,” she adds.

“The starfish?”

“No, the housemate. Or ex-housemate, I guess. Not that she has anything to be mad about, you know—she moved out first. It’s just—I’ve pissed off a lot of people with my life decisions, it turns out.” 

When he stares at her expectantly, awaiting elaboration, she explains, “My business was failing, so I kind of abandoned that, quit my job, and packed up all my belongings, and shipped them off to New York without telling anybody. And then I did tell them, and they weren’t happy, and I didn’t want to deal with that, so I let them think I’d left town when I hadn’t yet, and now I’m hiding out in a hotel in LA so I could attend an audition I signed up for before any of this even happened.”

His throat tightens as he can’t help but think of his father’s disparagement, of how quickly it had bled through from indignation to condemnation. “So what you’re saying is, you’re kind of crazy.” 

“No I’m not,” she says, forehead creasing deeply. “I’m not crazy.”

“Mm,” he hums, noncommittal. “Sounds like something a super not crazy person would say.”

Apparently he’s struck some kind of nerve, because before he can blink she growls, striding out of the marine exhibit and all but slamming the door back in his face when he tries to trail after her.

“Oh, come on. That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?”

Something in her expression darkens so suddenly that he can practically see the storm cloud forming over her head, soaking her ocean-blue hair in the downpour and illuminating her pale face with lightning as she whirls on her heel to glare at him.

“Screw you,” she snaps, and the hot, bright, overwhelming urge to fight back percolates and boils over inside of him, splintering into something sharp and petty he can’t quite justify in intensity.

He doesn’t know her, didn’t invite her along—he certainly doesn’t need to babysit her through an inexplicable mood swing.

“Okay, you know what? Fine. We’re done here,” he says, hardening. 

“Fine with me,” she shoots at him, and then they’re both stalking away from each other without a single glance back.

 

**|◀◀**

He flings open the door and pushes past her, the indignation rolling off him in waves. “You’re _erasing_ me?”

“Excuse me, you cannot just barge into my house. And you know what? You don’t have any right to be mad. _You’re_ erasing me!”

“Because _you_ did it first!”

This isn’t how it went, the first time—but Nathaniel feels possessed by the exact same brand of petulance that overtook him back then. The way he’d taken his shame and reshaped it into spite; the way he could only look at her and see everything she’d given him only to snatch away the second he’d let himself be weak enough to want it.

“Oh my god, you’re so transparent,” she sneers, stepping right up into his personal space. “It’s not my fault you can’t get over me.”

“I can’t wait to be over you,” he says. 

“Yeah, well—I’m going to be over you first. I’m going to be so over you. Of the two of us, I’m going to be over you the most.”

He can’t help but falter at the proximity—there’s a physical pull that to some degree has always existed between them, that makes his brain short circuit every time they touch. Even in his most righteous anger he wants to consume her, swallow her whole.

He knows what happens next. They stop themselves before the surrender; he storms out before either of them can give in. They dance around each other for weeks before they pause to have an honest conversation, and the second they do it’s like the world’s most overwhelming aphrodisiac.

He feels so _tired_ , stuck in this greatest hits of their history that he didn’t realise he was signing up for, where he knows every stupid misstep before he’s about to make it. He wants to slow down. Wants to skip ahead to the end.

“I lied,” he murmurs, looking down his nose at her, chest heaving. “I don’t want to forget about you at all.”

Rebecca blinks at him, the irascible flame burning around her suddenly not quite so incandescent. “I don’t want to forget about you either.” She lets out a breath, sliding her hands up his chest. Fisting her fingers in the fabric. “I don’t want to disappear.”

“I don’t know how to make it stop.”

There’s a beat and then Rebecca takes his hand in hers and drags him through her house towards her bedroom, only when she opens the door and they cross the threshold it’s not her room they’re bursting into at all but the San Bernardino court.

“Excuse me,” the frazzled, frizzy-haired judge says, visibly irritated by the disruption. “Can you guys come back here? I can barely hear what you’re saying.”

“Sorry, Your Honour—the counsel requires a brief recess,” Nathaniel tosses over his shoulder as he stumbles after Rebecca, determinedly making her beeline past the rail and down the length of the gallery while all their colleagues look on with disinterest.

When she pushes through the heavy public doors this time they’re back at the office, caught in the flurry of removalists in the midst of irrevocably merging his professional life with hers. 

“What are we doing?” he asks her, following her inside and snubbing the lock. Gloria Steinem side-eyes him from beside the couch.

Rebecca slides her hands into his and squeezes, her sea-glass eyes impossibly wide and imploring, and it’s as if somebody’s turned up the saturation on her and Nathaniel can’t make himself look away. 

“If they’re erasing all the memories with me in it, maybe you and I just need to go someplace else.”

He shakes his head. “Go someplace else? How?”

“Like we just did, only different. This is _your_ subconscious we’re in—your dream. Maybe it’s like… like a Room of Requirement. Just close your eyes and… think of some place I’m not, but take me with you.”

He feels so _tired_ , and he’s only getting more exhausted, and when the room starts fall out of focus around him, he lets his his eyes flutter closed as he gives himself over to sleep.

 

►►| 

It’s quieter, without her. He tells himself that’s a good thing.

He knows he should hate it, this unplanned tag-along to his alone time, keeping him from properly turning over his thoughts. Be glad to be rid of the distraction. Which is why he rolls his eyes when he meanders into the big cat exhibit only to spot her sitting on the observation deck, hands gripping the seat either side of where she’s sitting and legs swinging absently back and forth below. 

Of course stomping off in opposite directions has only brought them to the exact same destination. 

Despite every logical inclination telling him to turn around and leave, he finds himself shoving his hands into his pockets in consternation, sucking down on his pride and making his way over to drop down onto the bench beside her.

“I’m not here because of you,” he says. “Just so you know. I’m only here to see the cheetahs.”

She doesn’t respond, and he considers leaving her be. But the second he shifts his weight forward onto his feet she clears her throat, eyes narrowing as if at some profound sight in the distance he can’t see.

“I’ve never been to this zoo,” she tells him. “I’ve never been to the theme parks, or the water parks. I lived here for three years and I never did anything.”

“You went to the zoo,” he corrects with a half-smile, and its yin finds its reluctant yang on the side of her face.

She scrunches her mouth up. “God, what was I doing this whole time? I don’t even know. It’s just this… blur, where a life should be, because I came here looking for something that didn’t exist.”

“Which was?”

She leans forward, propping her elbows on her knees and resting her chin in her hands. The dozing cheetah half-obscured by the tall grass opens its gold eyes to regard them, ears twitching and tail flicking lazily.

“I was looking for something that would make me happy. But that’s a lot of pressure to put on a place, it turns out, and I got a little lost along the way.” She glances sideways at him. “Do you believe in fate?”

Nathaniel rolls his eyes. “There’s no such thing as fate.”

“Right,” she agrees. “Right. But for a period there I was putting an unhealthy amount of credence in signs, so I’m trying to dial it back. Taking charge of my own destiny, responsibility for my own happiness—that kind of thing.”

He raises his eyebrows. “By taking advice from a smoothie stand?”

“Exactly—turning over a new leaf. Only I think it turns out the underside of the leaf said New York all along. That’s where I’m from—Scarsdale. And the only reason I’m in California right now is because I was… running away.” 

“And now you’re done running?”

“Well,” she says with a shrug, “you saw how out of shape I am. It was all going to catch up with me eventually. Besides, it’s time for my quarter-life crisis to be officially over. Quarter-life? Mid-life? Neither of those feels appropriate, but third-life just makes it sound like I have multiple lives, like a cat.” She shakes her head. “Anyway, it’s time for me to go home and face the music. Or at least that’s what my mom thinks.”

“Do you do everything your mom tells you to do?”

“Depends. Do you do everything your daddy does?”

The flare of irritation makes his lip curl, but he pushes it down and away. _Not anymore_ , he wants to retort, but he’s done being defensive, and something about her unnerving frankness makes him honest. “I do, yes.”

She nods, accepting this. “You should get a nose piercing,” she suggests after a short silence.

He can’t help it—he laughs. “Should I.”

“Yeah,” she grins. “Just, like, a plain silver ring, nothing fancy. Stick it to the man. Stick it to your dad.”

They sit in quite contemplation for a moment until his phone rings, and when he sees his father’s name flash across the screen he silences the call and slips it back into his pocket without a second glance.

 

**|◀◀**

_I hate that you’re not here. I want to touch you so bad._

He’s got a one handed grip on himself, sunk down low in his bed and fumbling with the keyboard of his phone in the other.

“What the fuck, dude,” Rebecca sighs, fitting her body against his so she can hook her chin to read over his shoulder. “We don’t have time for this.”

Her dark red sweater tickles where it brushes against his bare skin.

“I’m sorry,” he says, still stroking himself by some invisible compulsion. “My mind went—”

“Yeah, yeah. Blah blah blah, neural pathways. In retrospect I can see the connection. Let’s just wrap it up so we can get out of here, okay?” She squints at the speech bubbles on his screen. “Ooh—tell me how much you want to put your mouth on my pussy.”

He almost drops the phone on his face from cringing. “Jesus, Rebecca. You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

“Have you ever sexted before?” she counters. “Gimme that.”

She rips the phone out of his grip, rolling onto her side to face away from him. Her front teeth sink into her lower lip as she scrolls back up to review the message history. “What do you want to say? I’ll type. I’m sure it’s easier for you if it’s a hands-free scenario.” When he only gapes at her, she rolls her eyes. “Fine. I’ll get you started, and you can just… tap in whenever you feel like it.”

Keenly aware he’s somehow caught in the world’s weirdest long-distance three-way, Nathaniel tries to ignore the warmth emanating from the body next to him, tries to shut out the stark blue glow from the message window hanging overhead. 

“We could take a picture,” Rebecca suggests, digging her elbow into the pillow and resting her head in her free hand. “I could help you get a good angle.”

“I already sent a picture,” he says, defensively.

She reaches out to pat him on the cheek. “And it was very cute.” The phone vibrates with another text, and her voice turns breathy. “How do you feel about me touching myself beneath a blanket on Paula’s parents’ antique couch right now?”

He grunts. “Sounds unsanitary.”

“Oh god, what if she catches me,” Rebecca says, voice pitching low and hitching as she reads aloud from the screen. “The way she would have caught us this morning if I…”

“If you what?”

“If I jumped you the way I wanted to. If I let you fuck me.”

The sound claws up unbidden from the back of his throat. _If you could hear the noises I’m making because of you._

“On your couch?”

“Too far away,” she gasps, and the urgency of it catches on every notch of his spine as it runs through him.

His voice is rough by the time he manages to locate it again. “I would have lifted you up onto the kitchen counter. Pushed off all your bags. You won’t be needing them.”

She laughs, deep and throaty. “If you want me to cancel my trip I’m going to need some convincing.”

“I’d press myself against you. I’ve been hard since you hugged me. Since I smelled you. Had you in my arms.”

“I wish it was you touching me. I wish—I wish you were inside me right now, instead of just my fingers.”

He lets out a needy whine and Rebecca looks over at him, observing him with a cool kind of detachment that doesn’t remotely match the affectation in her voice. _“I’m squeezing my cock and imagining it’s you,”_ she narrates as she types. _“Your mouth. Your cunt.”_

Nathaniel feels the very tips of his ears turn red. “I wouldn’t say that,” he protests.

“That’s what makes it sexy,” she assures him, not glancing up from the screen. The phone vibrates again and makes a noise that’s half laugh, half whimper. “Fuck, Nathaniel. You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

He squeezes his eyes shut. “You… you know exactly what I can do with my mouth. What I can do to you.”

“Remind me.”

Nathaniel groans. He’s struggling—both in embarrassment and through the fog of his own arousal—and Rebecca’s staring at him expectantly, fingers poised to type. He decides to steer them closer towards his comfort zone.

“I’m gonna use Parseltongue. Open your Chamber of Secrets.”

Her laugh is breathy, simultaneously disappointed in the rating change and delighted. “Stop talking dirty.”

“I thought that was the whole point?” He’s still working himself beneath the covers, and the room starts to quake with the force of his pulse drumming hard in his ears. “I’m so close, Rebecca. I wish I could see your face when you come. When I come inside of you.”

“Oh my god.” 

Rebecca’s hand grips his thigh through the comforter from beside him and then suddenly she’s crying out, muffled, biting the back of her hand as her left leg contracts and her whole body trembles, her hips jerking erratically upwards. It’s just about the hottest thing he’s ever seen.

He turns on his side and tangles his hands in her hair, gathers her into his arms. “Did you just…?”

She’s still fully clothed, her skin dewy with sweat, her face practically glowing. The inseam of her jeans is visibly damp, and he’s never wanted to kiss her more. “Yeah. I mean—that’s how you imagined it, right? It’s what was in your mind.”

_Was it good for you too, Plimpton?_

_You have no idea._

_Hahahesjdfjjhkg._

The letters start to shake and slip from the sky, collecting on the floor of his apartment in puddles. “We have to get out of here,” he reminds her. “Go away together.”

“Can’t a girl have a little come-down, first?” she mumbles, eyes closed, face tipped towards his collarbone. “That was kind of a big one.”

He smiles, dipping his nose to nuzzle against hers. “No time for afterglow. We really have to go,” he says, softly. The room rumbles when he scoops her up. “I need to take you somewhere. Somewhere else, where we can be together.”

“Somewhere you’ve buried,” she agrees as she wraps her arms around his neck, the words slurring together and coming out of her all slow and viscous, like honey. “Somewhere humiliating, or upsetting, where you never go.”

 

►►|

“Exeunt, through the gift shop?”

She scoffs at him, but he’s pretty sure her eyes crinkle around the edges, just for a second. “ _Sir._ As if there’s any other way.”

There’s a display table of salt and pepper shakers decorated with pink and red hearts in a clear attempt to capitalise on the occasion, and she makes an immediate beeline for it, setting about rearranging the animals out of their intended couplings and gnawing mischievously on her lip all the while.

“So. Counter point,” she begins on a non sequitur, idly running her fingers over a pair of ceramic likeness of a macaw the same colour as the tips of her hair. Its beak makes a clacking sound as it butts up against the magnetic nose of a rosy-cheeked sea lion in a questionable display of interspecies relations.

“Counter point to what, exactly?”

“To fate,” she says, the _duh, dude—keep up_ implicit in her voice.

“Oh, wonderful. We’re back to this again.”

“Synchronicity.” She flashes a giraffe salt shaker with elongated, spider-leg eyelashes in his direction. “Ah, sexual dimorphism—one of nature’s great wonders, isn’t it?”

He shakes his head. “Sorry—synchronicity?”

“Yeah. It’s when things—”

“I’m familiar with the term, thank you.”

“I’m just saying. This series of unrelated coincidences has been surprisingly pleasant, right? Mostly. We dipped a little in the middle, there.” Her face pinches as they shuffle past the flower cart inundated with single-stemmed red roses dominating the walkway. “God, it’s kind of inescapable, isn’t it?”

He glances at her knowingly. “Let me guess—Valentine’s Day is a lie sold to us by corporations that want us to feel bad about ourselves and overcompensate by spending all our money on overpriced tokens of affection that can’t even begin to scratch the surface of human connection.”

“You know, your tone was dripping with cynicism just then, but ‘scratch the surface of human connection’? That’s… poetic, dude.” She juts her chin towards him with a sudden surge of conviction. “And for the record—no. I happen to love Valentine’s Day. Who cares if it’s been commercialised? Love should be celebrated. In all its forms.”

They both stop in their tracks when they reach the oversized alligator sprawled out across one of the back shelves.

She combs her fingers through its plush green fur, and before he knows what he’s doing, Nathaniel is mimicking the movement, their hands not-quite grazing in the middle. 

“Is it weird that I kind of want to buy this?” she asks him conspiratorially.

Even weirder is that he kind of wants to, too. 

“You have no money,” he reminds her. “And it’s bigger than you are—how would you even carry it home?”

Tamping down on the way her pout has his fingers itching for his credit card, he channels the resulting energy into holding open the exit door and gesturing her through. 

He feels his neck flush when she offers him a ridiculous curtsy in response.

 

**|◀◀**

He sets her down on her feet and suddenly he feels ten years old again.

“Ugh,” Rebecca says, physically recoiling from the amount of chintz. “This room looks like somebody murdered a flower garden.” She plucks at her aggressively sensible grey dress. “Woah. What am I wearing? Who am I supposed to be?”

“Heidi?” he says, frowning.

“Heidi? Who the hell is Heidi?”

A tremor sends the room shaking and the windows rattling, and his arm wraps around her shoulders to shield her, to pull her protectively away from the walls. “Heidi was my au pair when I was a child. She practically raised me.”

“Dude, you cast me as your nanny? _”_ Rebecca grins, waggling her eyebrows. “A little messed up, but I think I can get behind it.”

Something rolls along the floor to stop where it hits Nathaniel’s sneaker, and when he bends down to pick up the orange bottle with its mocking printed label and stark white cap, his blood runs instantly cold.

“I don’t think I want to be here,” he says, swallowing. “My father wouldn’t like it. I’m not—I’m not supposed to be up here. ”

“It’s okay,” Rebecca tells him. “That’s the whole point. They’ll never find us.”

Hand in his, she tugs him up the stairs and he obediently follows, the two of them dodging every picture frame that vibrates off its hook and crashes as they pass until the carpet crunches with glass beneath their feet. It’s as if the higher they climb the longer the steps stretch out in front of them, narrowing to a corridor of light that beckons from the upper landing. They’re getting bigger, or he’s getting smaller, or it’s some confusing combination of the two and by the time they reach the top and Rebecca has to help haul him up the last of it, his chin is barely past her shoulders.

He moves towards the muted light spilling from the doorway of his mother’s bedroom, and she’s there, just like he knows she will be, and she’s on the floor, just like he knows she will be, and he doesn’t know how to help her, how to _wake her up._

“Mom?” he chokes out.

But then something dark and brackish starts seeping through the blonde of her hair, turning it brown, and somehow he knows even before they reach her that when they turn the body over, it’s going to be Rebecca.

His lungs constrict in his chest.

“Hey, buddy? You need to focus,” Rebecca says, crouching down in front of him to grip him firmly by his shoulders. “Look at me—look at me, Nathaniel. You need to breathe. Your mom’s not dead and neither am I, but if we don’t get out of here I may as well be.”

He can barely hear her over the sound of his blood rushing in his ears, past how every last inch of his breath is being pushed out of him in a painful squeeze, the dizzying smell of chlorine coming off her like the world’s most sickening perfume.

“Here,” she says, snatching his hand and splaying it open-palmed across her chest, her fingers sliding between his to hold it there, to dig them in. “I want you to breathe with me, okay? That’s all you have to do—just focus on me, and breathe.”

Rebecca’s pulse is strong and steady, her skin flush and warm and corporeal; _alive_. When his vision stops swimming he keeps it trained on her—her denim jacket, her flouncy skirt, the way her hair hangs in loose chocolate curls—and all the flowers on the wallpaper bloom into bright red roses around them.

It takes a small eternity, but his heartbeat slows to synchronise with hers.

As soon as he can gather adequate air to do so, he lets out a heavy breath, cradling her face to draw her forehead hard against his. “Hi,” he whispers. “I’m—I’m glad you’re still here.”

“Hi,” she whispers back. “And quick question—what the hell are _you_ wearing?”

It’s not until she says it that he realises he’s wet—pulling back from her to take in his damp blue board shorts and notice the way they cling uncomfortably to the backs of his thighs. He can feel himself losing grip on the memory—feel it shifting, giving way to something else.

“No,” he says. “No—this isn’t right.”

The room flickers, as if in confused discord with her presence; the wallpaper peeling back to reveal every worrying crack appearing in the newly exposed plaster as the roses start to shrivel and wither and die.

“ _Run_ ,” Rebecca breathes, knotting her fingers through his. “Run, and don’t stop.”

 

►►|

They linger outside the front gate.

“So… it’s Valentine’s Day,” she says, apropos of nothing. Her hands are clasped behind her back as she swings into her walk. “And I think we just went on a date.”

He scoffs and stutters, loathe to admit he’s been caught off guard. “That was _not_ a date. That was… light stalking, at best.”

“I don’t know, dude. You bought me not one, but two drinks. Took me somewhere nice, paid for my ticket—”

“Because you conveniently forgot your purse,” he interrupts.

“— _and_ you were totally considering buying me that giant alligator back there,” she continues as if he hasn’t spoken, ignoring his performative eye roll. “When was the last time you went on a date? I’m pretty sure this qualifies.” 

Despite the stubborn impulse to continue to contradict her, he finds himself wracking his brain for a truthful response. He knows it must have been with Mona, but he has trouble recalling the specifics; realises with an all too guilty stab that he’s hard pressed to even remember her face, these days. Their relationship is strangely foggy to him. Like it’s caught up in the cloud of something else.

“I don’t know,” he says, shrugging. “Few months, maybe. Fancy dinner in Beverly Hills.”

She pauses on the pathway, and it takes him a second to realise and pull to a similar stop. She’s fidgeting, her lower lip dragging between her teeth, and it’s the most unsure of herself he’s seen her the entire day.

“My hotel isn’t far from here,” she blurts out, then snaps her mouth shut and straightens her spine, as if the words came out of their own surprising volition. She hurriedly tacks on, “My purse is there. I’d like to, um. Pay you back.”

The way she says _pay you back_ isn’t seductive, per se, but it’s unmistakably some version of inviting, and the lilt of the words starts to gurgle and fizz unpredictably in his stomach like an elementary school project volcano.

“And just to clarify, I am not a prostitute. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just. Um. Sex,” she ends up exhaling in a rush. “I’m suggesting we should have sex. Of the non-transactional kind. Because it’s Valentine’s Day and I’ve got nothing better to do and dating apps are weird and hard, and you look like, well, you, and… yeah. That’s where I was headed, with the hotel thing.”

“Yeah,” he can’t help but huff out on a laugh. “Funnily enough, I got that.”

 

**|◀◀**

“Oh god, don’t stop,” Rebecca moans, clawing blindly at the back of his head and shoulders. “Why are you—oh my god _,_ why are you stopping?”

There’s a loud rattling—the sound of someone jiggling the locked closet door in frustration, dialled up to thunder—and Nathaniel pulls back to rest his cheek against her quivering thigh. When he unhooks her leg from his shoulder she makes a desperate, unimpressed mewl of a noise as he withdraws. 

“I thought—I thought someone was coming,” he says.

As soon as Rebecca opens her mouth he knows she’s about to say something lewd, so he kisses her and lets her taste herself just to keep her quiet.

“Whew. A lot of our relationship sure was built on sex, huh?” Rebecca muses when they break for air, pressing her hair up off her sweaty forehead. “Like, objectively fantastic, out-of-the-park sex. But sex nonetheless.”

“It wasn’t about the sex,” he tells her solemnly, ignoring the way the words sting as he speaks them. “Not for me.”

_It was about you. Me and you._

She slides down off the filing cabinet on unsteady legs, fingers fumbling to straighten her rumpled clothes. Nathaniel can’t pinpoint the memory exactly—those eight months were a heady blur of ill-advised but incredible rinse and repeat—but he thinks from the creeping length of her hair and how shameless she is that it has to be somewhere close to the end.

“You were supposed to take us to a memory without me in it,” she admonishes, still refastening the front of her blouse.

He scrunches his eyes shut. “I know,” he says. “I know, but I can’t stop thinking about you.”

The door starts to rattle again, and it’s more determined, this time, and somehow Nathaniel knows they have to go, get out before somebody finds them.

They’re in a maze of metal shelving, lights blinking erratically on and off over their heads and her outfit keeps changing like she’s glitching, like she’s cycling through some sort of digital wardrobe in his brain. 

Black dress with coloured flowers. Burgundy. Stanford shirt. Cobalt blouse with lacy bra.

“I don’t remember,” he chokes out. “I don’t remember what you were wearing.”

The shelving groans its protest as the metal beams twist and bend in on themselves, until they’re stumbling over the toppled pen cups and scattered paper and a thousand yellow highlighters, the let-loose coloured flags swirling around and sticking to them like confetti.

“This doesn’t even make _sense._ ”

“You should have seen the inside of my head,” Rebecca quips, slightly breathless from her struggle to keep up with him. “Yours is more the big-budget blockbuster brand of weird, but mine was all avant-garde and theatrical. It was like scrubbing out a three ringed circus with an electric toothbrush, but like one of the kid ones, that plays an annoying song. And a _lot_ of metaphorical matches. Just endless emotional arson, set to music.”

They duck around a corner and Nathaniel pulls her up the passageway away from the chaos, pulls her close. She’s wearing green, now—a long sleeved, billowing shirt that’s flattering enough but makes him uneasy in a way he can’t properly place. He toys with the hem of it, nudges it up to trace the ridge of her jeans, unable to put his finger on why this particular shade of it makes him feel like he needs to be sick.

“Hey. This is the last time,” Rebecca says, black fingernails biting into the back of his neck where she holds him, and he answers her on autopilot.

“Right,” he agrees automatically, distracted. He’s still searching for their escape. “Absolutely. Never happening again.”

“No, Nathaniel,” she says, sadly. “You don’t understand. This is the _last time.”_

 

►►|

He takes her in for a moment and tries to commit her to memory—drinks in her almost manic sea-glass eyes, her overall voluptuousness, the ridiculous colour of her hair—and thinks about how much his father would hate her. His human equivalent of a nose ring.

He thinks about his car, still tucked away in the golf course parking lot, where his father would be unable to miss it.

Then he wonders very much what it would be like to kiss her.

“Look. You and I are very different,” he begins, and then stops, because something tells him that’s not entirely true.

She’s not-quite glaring back at him—like this is a dismissal she’s heard all too many times before—and something about the resigned but wounded look it summons into her eyes makes him desperate to clarify what that means.

“—and I can’t explain why, but I think I might like that about you.”

“You like me?” she grins, eyebrows crinkling into something almost adorably hopeful.

“Like something _about_ you,” he corrects automatically, but he can feel himself grinning back despite all efforts to the contrary.

 

**|◀◀**

_“This is the last time.”_

He blinks, and they’re in the court room, the day of her off-book plea, and he feels the exact same lurch low in his stomach as he did back then. Everybody else is there that’s supposed to be, too—judge and bailiff, the impatient prosecutor, Rebecca’s friends, including a belatedly teary-eyed Paula—but the dull roar of their presence fades out and blends into the background in a blur.

“I don’t know what happens next,” he says. “I didn’t stay.”

“I wish you stayed,” she says quietly, and the lamps start blinking off overhead until it’s just the two of them at the defendant’s table, bathed in eerie, fluorescent light that has Rebecca’s standard issue orange jumpsuit glowing—as if somebody’s turned up the saturation on her, and Nathaniel can’t make himself look away. 

She seems so _small._

“I wish I stayed. I was an idiot.”

“Yeah,” she agrees, huffing out a teary laugh. “Yeah, you really were.”

They peel back the jumpsuit together, metal studs popping beneath their frantic fingers, tugging the white t-shirt up over her head until she’s naked, and he’s naked, and her skin is impossibly soft where it slides against his with nothing left in between.

He carries her to his bed and makes love to her, reverent and adoring and gentle, like he can’t feel her crumbling into dust beneath his fingertips, like he can’t repay her enough for still allowing him to touch her after all this _time._ He can’t stop murmuring her name, sighing it against her skin like a mantra, determined to hold onto the way it still feels familiar on his tongue.

“I’m sorry for thinking I could do this,” he says, the words like broken glass in his throat. “I just—I didn't know how else to let you go.” 

His face is damp, and he hides it in her neck to muffle the sob.

“Who can say,” Rebecca murmurs, her sing-song sweet and soft and sad as she threads her fingers through his hair, “if I’ve been changed for the better…”

They fall asleep twisted together, tangled—his body wrapped around hers and holding her impossibly tight—but when the morning light filters in through the windows in his apartment, Nathaniel wakes up and every last trace of Rebecca is gone.

 

▉

_Nathaniel Plimpton III (Esq.) has erased Rebecca Bunch from his memory. Please refrain from mentioning their relationship to him again._

 

▶►|

“True confesh time,” she breathes as he kisses his way down the length of her body. “I haven’t done this in awhile. Like, not just the dating part but the sexing part. I know it’s not really something you forget—there’s that whole riding a bike comparison, not that you’ve ever seen me on a bike—so what I’m saying is I could be kind of rusty. Though not, like, physically rusty, because that was kind of a concern the last time I tried this—and funnily enough there was a bike involved—but I’m clean. Passed the window and everything.”

“Do you always talk this much?” he asks, pushing aside her underwear to thread his fingers through the damp curls underneath.

“And I don’t usually do this. Pick people up from food carts, that is,” she continues on as if he hasn’t spoken, as if his hand isn’t really there. She pauses to reconsider, a horrified look pinching at her features. “No, that’s not entirely true—I have done this once before. I brought a guy home from a vegan taco stand. Oh, god—does that make this a _thing_ , now? Is this a pattern?”

Nathaniel frowns, pausing in his oral circumnavigation of her navel. “Should I come back to this later?”

“Shut up,” she tells him, hips tipping upwards, impatient, and then he touches her—properly touches her—and she seemingly forgets how to form words.

 

▐▐ 

“That was actually very satisfying.”

She shifts on top of him, and he twitches beneath the sheets where they’re still naked and pressed together, his hand sliding down to her hip to hold her still.

“Isn’t it always?”

“Not remotely—but I’m always open to challenging statistics.”

Nathaniel pauses in tucking her hair behind her ear, confused by the rush of painful familiarity that accompanies it. There’s a sensation, here in this strange space where he’s not yet properly pulled awake, like a memory of a memory of a dream—like he can’t remember her specifically, but if he tries hard enough, he can almost remember what remembering her might feel like.

The more he tries to hold onto it, the more it slips away.

“So I think,” she begins carefully, walking her fingers up the bare expanse of his chest, “that as long as it’s still light out, it doesn’t even count as a one night stand.”

“Solid logic,” he concedes, tone equally cautious.

After a beat she says, “We should probably make it count, though, right?”

He’d be lying if he said he was disappointed. 

Her hand stops when she reaches his sternum, gliding absently outwards along his collarbones, and it makes his own fingers flex where they’ve settled on the small of her back. 

“How exactly does this fit in with healthy choices?”

“I mean, I literally picked you up from an organic juice stand, so. As healthy of a tall drink as I was ever gonna get, really.”

And she has a point—something about the way she kissed him in the elevator up to her floor had felt strangely organic. The way she hoisted herself into his arms with no warning when they’d barely made it into the room felt organic, too. The way her legs are still tangled around his so he can feel the searing heat of her—well. That feels very _, very_ organic. 

Synchronistic. Serendipitous, even.

He can’t explain why, but for this brief, untouchable pocket in time, he wants to know every last thing about her.

“Okay,” he murmurs back at her, and she grins.

“Okay,” she says, sighing as she sinks back into him, and the sound of her contentment fills up all the empty space.

 

►

When he goes into the office on Monday to clear out his desk, there’s a _FOR SALE_ sign on the empty pretzel store in the lobby.

His gaze barely lingers on it at all as he leaves.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> End note, because one of the things I struggled a lot with in finishing this fic was definitely But What Are You Trying To Say Here: For the record, the idea of Rebecca leaving West Covina hurts my entire heart, but from the perspective of all the stuff that’s gone down for her since she arrived—botched wedding and subsequent spiral, suicide attempt, jail—I am interested in the arguable net worth of her experiences there. So I think there’s something slightly hopeful—if not still vaguely depressing, especially since so many of Rebecca’s friendships are enmeshed in her romantic entanglements—in these two characters that came to West Covina being able to take some of that growth it gave them back to where they started and re-attempt their original lives, with the persisting impulse to reshape them but minus all the unfortunate baggage. Kind of like that Maya Angelou quote— _people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel._


End file.
